Jack and the Shoe Box
I worked one floor down on the fifth floor for a now defunct stock brokerage firm called Global America. The Paris office of Global America was a two-bedroom apartment with a huge lounge, which served as the office. A large wooden table took up most of the office. A phone accommodated each chair. Cold callers sat at the table making calls to either get the guy who buys on the phone or to make an appointment with his or her secretary. The brokers paced the floor of the office in anticipation of grabbing the phone and making the push to close a deal. Some of the brokers did push ups, sit ups, jumping jacks, anything to psyche themselves up for the moment the phone would be passed to them by the cold caller. It was a game. I was a cold caller. Cold calling was not my forte. I mumbled my way through conversations with people on the other line in Paris, Milan, Geneva, etc. Most of the people on the other line spoke English but in case they didn't I had scripts written in French and Italian in front of me. These were the days of Michael Milken and to be a broker was to be a movie star.
The brokers in the Paris office of Global America either came from the New York or Florida office. The cold callers were mostly Americans living in Paris looking for work with an American company because their French wasn't good enough to work for a French one. There was Buck the former model from Tennessee who wasn't making enough as a model so he was giving cold calling a go. He looked like a male version of Sissy Spacek and was about as bad as I was at cold calling. There was Dianne the go getter from Wisconsin who wanted to be a broker and test her chops against these New York and Florida boys. She was a good cold caller and probably eventually did make a good broker. Andy from Queens wasn't a broker. He did the hiring, answered the phone calls as the first port of stop, dealt with the New York office and technical side of trading stocks and bonds. People said Andy looked like Tom Cruise. He was a nice guy who could adapt to a variety of situations but he wasn't interested in learning French or watching French films or eating French food. He was in Paris for the short term, like the rest of them.
One night I fell off the back of Andy's motorcycle. It was a life changing moment. I had vowed after the first time I had got on the back of his fancy Honda motorcycle that I would never get on a motorcycle again, especially if he was driving. The first time I had the misfortune he drove around the peripherique of Paris swerving in and out of cars at one hundred and thirty miles per hour. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I could not tell him to slow down because I was hanging on for dear life. Months later, when we stumbled out of the Latin Quarter nightclub at three in the morning I was not thinking straight because I got on the back of his motorcycle again. I figured we weren't going to be on the peripherique, just a short trip back to Sevres Babylon in the seventh. He approached the red light casually but he had his eye on the other light to time the turn to green so he could gun it and punch through the small quaint Parisian intersection of the 6th arrondisement as fast as he could. He neglected to alert me. I flew off the back of the bike onto the back of the helmet, feet over backwards, sliding on the helmet for twenty metres until inertia and gravity slowed and up I SPRANG TO MY FEET. This was explained to me later by Tony, another broker, riding the other motorcycle who witnessed the whole thing and had to swerve to avoid running me over. I can remember walking through St. Germain des Pres toward Sevres Babylon with the now heavily damaged helmet on my head and these two New Yorkers pushing their motorcycles and pleading with me to stop walking and take the helmet off. I walked all the way back to the shoebox and locked myself in. I took the helmet off. I was in a state of shock, a daze. I felt extremely sore in the morning around my neck, shoulders and back. But lucky to be alive and not crippled.
Things changed after that night. It was time to get out of the office- learn French, roam Paris. Andy and Tony said that if I didn't want to be a cold caller any more they’d find other work for me. I didn't care, so long as it didn't involve picking up the phone any more. They sent me on errands, asked me to clean the rooms, the bathroom, etc.. Tony had the great idea to have a party in the office. Andy was all for it. They drew up little flyers to advertise the party and they sent me out in the streets to pass them out.
‘No ugly ones, and no men,’ they said.
I thought it was a ridiculous idea but I walked around the streets of the Latin Quarter passing out flyers to all the beautiful women I could find. It didn't take long to get rid of all those flyers. I spent the rest of the day playing flipper in cafes and walking around the Jardin de Luxembourg. Surprisingly quite a few actually came to the Global America party in the office turned back to luxury lounge, dance floor and all. I met Nathalie that night. I gave her one of my last flyers as she was coming out of the Musee D’Orsay. She was a voluptuous brunette with childbearing hips and a twinkle in her blue eyes. She looked like a young Catherine Deneuve, only prettier. It was nice to spend time with French people for a change. It was a couple of weeks later in her little ground floor flat as she was cooking some salmon pasta in the kitchen that she laid into me after I stupidly told her I wanted to be an actor. I'd had couple of glasses of red and thought it a good idea.
‘Oh Jean, everyone who comes to Paris thinks they are an artist or actor. C’est typique.’
Then the Gulf War kicked off. Paris had a charged feel about it. It was exciting walking the streets with the large gendarme and military presence about. I walked the streets trying to blend in, not seem too American, which meant keeping my mouth shut. It was then I came upon Jack’s advert, the one with he and Dustin Hoffman.There was Jack and Dustin Hoffman circa Tootsie and a quote from Hoffman praising Jack’s teaching. New York acting coach from the Actor's Studio. There was an address and a number to call, which I jotted down on a piece of paper and stuffed in my pee coat. I called the number a little while later. The French women on the other end told me to come in on Saturday morning. Jack would be auditioning.
Jack was behind a table with his assistant when I was called in. First he just wanted to chat. In those days I imagine it was unusual for Jack to have American or English speaking students in his Paris dojo. He wanted to know where was I from in America? Why was I there? What was I doing? And most importantly why did I want to be an actor? I told him I was from New Jersey, that I was in Paris to find myself and that I was destined to be an actor. Jack wanted to know why I thought I was destined to be an actor. I told him like Albert Einstein, at his chalkboard in search of the solution, he didn't know exactly what he was looking for but he knew he was on the right track, that he was on to something, that it was meant to be. Jack wasn't one to be impressed by anything but the truth and he was well aware that words were just words. He didn't seem too impressed but he accepted me into his class.
The beginning of one of Jack’s lessons was all about relaxation. We sat in chairs like puppets dangling and Jack would walk around after fifteen minutes to feel people’s shoulders and arms for tension. When he got to me and my shoulders and arms he said I was holding lots of tension. I needed to relax and lose the tension, an actor’s instrument is his body and it needs to be relaxed. That was true about Jack; he always looked so relaxed, like a puppet really. When he walked his arms swung like a puppet. His head was balanced at the top of his neck like a puppet. His legs moved like a puppet. He was funny too. Especially when he tried to speak French because he had the thickest Brooklyn Jewish accent you ever heard. There was a translator whenever Jack spoke because his French was non-existent.
After the relaxation bit he would get two actors to do a role-play. One actor would be at the door knocking. He needed something badly because the stronger the need the better. The person answering the door is extremely busy completing a task. The task has to be so important that the person knocking at the door is a major inconvenience. The point is to create drama- two people with contradicting needs. The number one rule of the exercise is that both actors are not allowed to ask questions. They can just observe and state what they see- not what they want, so their need is behind the words. Don't indicate. It's what you don't say.
The women in Jack’s class would take their clothes off a lot. Emmanuel Seigner, wife of Roman Polanski, was in the class. She loved to take her clothes off. Once, she took her top off and painted her large nipples red with lipstick. She wore only her knickers as the person at the door bothered her. I don’t remember the importance of her putting red lipstick on her nipples but she had large breasts and was completely uninhibited.
The first time I did the exercise I was the guy answering the door who is supposed to be really busy doing something and in no mood to be disturbed. I brought my bike into the studio. I was going to fix the front tire, i.e. put the tube and tire together and pump it up with air. Why? What was my need for doing this task? I told Jack that I needed to fix the bike in order to see my family in New Jersey. I needed to do it quickly before I ran out of time because I was cycling to the airport and I was going to miss the plane if I didn't get the tire changed quickly. I began to get very frustrated because I couldn't get the tire off because I didn't have a screwdriver to wedge the tire over the lip of the wheel. Jack loved my frustration.
That was lesson number one. Things need to be difficult to be interesting. The guy at the door needed me to help him find his dead father. Of course he didn't come right out and say it as that was against the rules. No Questions. Don't indicate. It’s what you don’t say.
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